Tesla Gigafactory Texas Is Officially OPEN!!
The Tesla GigaFactory in Austin Texas is officially open for business. This now joins Fremont California, Shanghai China and Berlin Germany in a growing list of international locations where the company produces their electric vehicles.
With an official Cyber Rodeo opening party on April 7th, Elon Musk will deliver the first Model Y vehicles from Giga Texas, which are also the first in a new generation of Tesla vehicle architecture that incorporates their in-house developed 4680 battery cell and structural battery pack. These cars may look like a regular Tesla Model Y on the outside, but on the inside the made in Texas vehicles are a giant leap forward in design and technology.
This is all made possible by one of the largest and most advanced manufacturing plants in the entire world. And unlike the odyssey of its sister factory in Germany, Giga Texas has come together at a spectacular pace, and will be a legitimate game changer for Tesla’s operations in North America. So today we’re talking about everything that has gone into making Giga Texas what it is today, and where this factory will take us in the future. Let’s get going.
Texas Sized Factory
The sheer size of this factory is pretty difficult to grapple with, the middle section is three quarters of a mile long, with one quarter mile in width - to walk a lap around the entire thing would be nearly 2 miles in distance. There are 4 levels to the factory that make up a height of about 7 stories, and the total floor space adds up to around 8 million square feet.
Underneath that monolithic diamond shape that we see today is actually 3 individual buildings running lengthwise across the factory. The reason that Tesla did this was to allow for covered roadways to run through the interior of the GigaFactory, this way they can drive full tractor trailers in the center of the plant to make pickups and deliveries directly to the location that they are needed. Tesla did something similar with the new GigaFactory in Germany, they surrounded the entire perimeter of the building with docking bays for semi truck trailers to allow targeted deliveries, but this still would require internal transportation for supplies to reach the center of the factory floor - Giga Berlin is much smaller by comparison to Giga Texas, so it probably doesn’t matter as much.
So far, the best look at the interior of the factory we have seen has come from this guy DJ Skee… I don’t know who he is either, but for whatever reason Tesla gave him a tour of the factory and let him record some video for Instagram that was published on March 24th. So, the first thing that we can see is that Tesla has a Model Y hanging from the ceiling at a weird angle, like it’s about to crash into the floor or something. Don’t know about that either. But as DJ Skee moves through the factory we can see a lot of Model Y vehicles and parts in various stages of construction, seemingly all painted either black or blue. We can also see that there is a lot of wide open space inside the factory that has yet to be developed.
Model Y production at Giga Texas is just step one. At some point in the next year this will be joined by production lines for the Tesla Cybertruck and even their gigantic electric Semi truck. There is also going to be a full production line for the 4680 battery inside the factory as well.
Giga Texas is the closest thing we have seen yet to Elon Musk’s grand vision of an alien dreadnought factory that can produce full vehicles purely through automation - a machine that builds machines. In order for that to be possible, then we need every aspect of the vehicle produced under one roof, or at least on the same factory site.
Tesla’s plant in Fremont California is a very bad example of this concept, they can’t even fit all of the necessary production equipment for the vehicle body under one roof, they had to resort to installing the giga press machines in the parking lot and putting up giant tents to build the Model 3 and Model Y - batteries and packs from Fremont vehicles are manufactured in Nevada and shipped over for final assembly. It’s pretty far from full automation.
The GigaFactory in Shanghai is a pretty close approximation to the autonomous alien dreadnought idea, they did manage to fit all of the vehicle production equipment inside the factory, they don’t have to make any parts in the parking lot. And they may not have on site battery production, but they do have Tesla’s battery cell manufacturing partners in China like CATL very close by.
Renewable Energy at Giga Texas
We’ve known for a while now that Tesla plans to cover the entire roof of Giga Texas with solar panels - observers have already noticed that they plan to spell out the word TESLA across the top with strategically placed gaps in the panels.
Something new that we are just learning is that Tesla has plans to install a large battery storage facility next to the factory that will manage the power generated by those panels. In a permit application filed with the City of Austin, Tesla is proposing to build “utility and associated improvements” on a 53 point 27 acre site at 12601 Tesla Rd, next to Giga Texas. The application was filed on March 25th, with the project name – “Giga Texas LCRA Permanent Switchyard & BESS” – giving a few hints about what those utilities and associated improvements will be. That abbreviation stands for Battery Energy Storage System, which in this case would be the Tesla Megapack unit, enough to cover 53 acres. Tesla says that they can deploy 1 gigawatt hour of storage capacity with Megapack on just 3 acres of land - so I don’t know how to calculate the maximum capacity when you factor in all of the support infrastructure and other stuff that will take up space on site, but needless to say, they are looking at installing a very substantial energy storage system along side the factory.
Made in Texas Model Y
Like we said off the top, the Model Y that is being produced at Giga Texas is a different internal design than the Model Y made at Fremont that American consumers have been receiving for the past two years.
Giga Texas is making full use of die casting technology with a large section of the production floor dedicated to Tesla’s Giga Press machines. These are humongous mechanical presses that use 6 thousand tons of force to press molten aluminum alloy into molds. These casting machines are powerful enough to create both the front and rear quarters of the vehicle frame using one single piece for each. No other automaker, and maybe no other manufacturer of any kind has ever been able to implement such a large, single piece casting into their product design. The upshot of this technology is pretty simple: instead of sticking together a bunch of small parts to try and make one big one, Tesla can use this injection method to form liquid metal directly into one large, solid part.
Tesla have been doing this successfully for about a year now with the rear section of the Model Y frame - that’s one of the parking lot additions at the Fremont factory, a Giga Press. But production at Giga Texas doubles that up with a casted front section as well - so the entire frame from the drivers feet to the front bumper is all one solid piece of aluminum. This helps to make the car stronger, lighter, more resistant to corrosion and less susceptible to manufacturing defects.
And because that isn’t enough, these cars also get Tesla’s latest and greatest in battery and pack design, the 4680 cell in a structural pack. So, we’ve already talked for hours about this energy system in the past, definitely check out our video, ``The Real Reason Tesla Developed the 4680 Battery” for a thorough explanation. But in the short form, this is an extremely efficient and powerful new battery design that Tesla are currently manufacturing at their own production line in California - they are targeting a much faster and cheaper battery to produce than their current generation of cell that has been going into the Model 3 and Model Y. Eventually Tesla will soon be manufacturing the 4680 on site at Giga Texas, and eventually at Giga Berlin as well in a separate building located adjacent to the existing vehicle factory. A special aspect of these cells is that they will integrate into what Elon Musk calls a structural battery pack - so much the same idea as the front and rear casting, Tesla are replacing a bunch of small parts with one big, solid chunk. In a standard Tesla battery pack there are cells, which go into modules, which go into the pack which then gets bolted into the frame of the vehicle - like a ‘box within a box within a box’ kind of deal. The new cells go straight into a pack without the need for modules and then that pack is attached between the front and rear Giga castings without the need for a separate frame, the pack is the frame, the top of the battery becomes the floor of the car and the seats are actually direct mounted to the top of the pack. And same story again - stronger, lighter, more efficient and lower margin for error - the simplest path is most often the correct one.
Unfortunately we are still very much in the dark about what the particular specs of these Texas made Model Ys will be. We can clearly see that hundreds of them have already been produced and staged in the parking lots surrounding the factory. Most of them have been black and blue, but recently we’ve also seen white and even red cars coming out of the production floor - so we know the paint shop is up and running at nearly full capacity right now. At first we were only seeing the Long Range Model Y variant with the standard silver wheels - but recently we’ve also been catching vehicles with the black coated rims, so these could be more Long Range vehicles with the Induction wheel upgrade or even the Performance variant of the Model Y that is only available with blacked out Uber turbine wheels.
This is already a big step up from Giga Berlin, which by the time of its first deliveries was only producing the Model Y Performance in Black and White, not very much variety at all.
The only thing we don’t really know about this Texas Model Y is whether or not the specs in regards to range and acceleration will differ at all from the Fremont made car. Given the advancements in battery cell and pack technology, it’s definitely possible that Tesla could spec these up to be an improved performer in both categories - but then that makes things complicated with the product line and setting customers expectations as to what car they’re actually going to receive. Chances are the Texas car and the California car are going to be identical on the spec sheet even if they are wildly different in physical design. 90% of consumers will not notice or even care about the difference, it’s basically just people like us that are going to obsess over this stuff. We’re not normal.
Of course, having said all that, now Elon Musk is probably going to announce a ton of new details about the Model Y on his Twitter that debunk our video before we even publish it. But such is life.
After that the big question remaining is just how many vehicles will they be able to build in this first year of production at Giga Texas - 100,000? 200,000? Stay tuned for updates.
